In this month’s episode, I interview ABC News tech correspondent Andrea Smith about such recent tech tidings as Research In Motion’s travails, Microsoft’s Windows 8 preview release and NetZero’s semi-free 4G wireless service. I also update some of my recent CEA posts–in particular, the item I wrote about outsourced manufacturing. (I’d hoped that talking to a radio and TV pro would make editing the podcast easy, but then I had to work around some Skype dropouts anyway. Sigh.)

I didn’t want to write yet another post about the problem of smartphone manufacturers and carriers ending software updates for phones that are still under contract–but how could I not after comparing that example to the two years of free updates my TV received, or Microsoft’s 13-year commitment to Windows XP?

This post advocating disabling or removing Java went up a couple of days earlier than usual, on account of the scope of the Flashback drive-by-download problem on Macs. I take no pleasure in noting that I predicted something like this last May… okay, I take a little pleasure in that. The column also offers a reminder about a helpful but somewhat-hidden search option at Google. I was flattered to see it get a prominent spot on USAT’s home page and show up as the most-read story Saturday morning, as you can see in the screenshot at left.

The research for one of this week’s posts began last year. For another, it started sometime in the early 1980s, when my brother and I were allowed to open presents on Christmas Eve for the first time ever–on account of the Atari 2600 under the tree.

I had high hopes for “The Art of Video Games” exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum. But between the absence of some memorable titles (seriously, y u no have Tetris?!), and the lack of attention to such cultural aspects as the game industry’s reliance on sequels, “TAOVG” felt a little thin. I did, however, still enjoy playing a vintage copy of Pac-Man–and getting congratulated by a 10-year-old after clearing the first board.

Because I’m kind of a data nerd (and because I realized the other post I was working on could easily be held for later), I wrote about Google’s new Account Activity reports. These detail your use of a few of the Web giant’s services–just the thing for people who keep refreshing their Foursquare stats page.

This post explains a News Feed graphical mismatch in Facebook’s iOS app that was supposedly fixed by an update that should have arrived Friday night but still isn’t in the App Store as I write this Sunday night. That’s some strange latency, especially on top of the four days it apparently took Facebook–of all the companies!–to get this bug-fix release okayed by Apple. The rest of the column advises backing up the recovery partition on your computer’s hard drive, something I finally remembered to do before installing the Consumer Preview release of Windows 8.